Monthly Archives: December 2016

The last time I built a new rig for myself was in October 2005. Oh, sure, I upgraded its CPU, RAM, GPU, and so forth as time went on, but the motherboard (and thus the general core of the machine) lasted over a decade. Go me. But a lot has changed in the past decade, so I’ve finally built something new.

To the point: the motherboard I chose, the GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 7, has a Sound Blaster Recon3Di as its onboard audio, but there appears to be a problem with Creative’s drivers when running a 5.1 Surround setup on Windows 10. Every time I reboot, the audio is disabled. To get it working again I have to open their control panel, switch to headphone mode, and switch back to 5.1 Surround. That’s all it takes, but it’s a pretty big annoyance and a huge embarrassment for Creative. Shame on y’all for not testing your drivers before releasing them!

My solution, though utterly ridiculous, is to use reliable old AutoHotkey. This little script has WOMM Certification, so your mileage may vary:

I compiled that and put the resulting executable in an out-of-the-way location. I figured I could create a shortcut that would run as admin in the Startup folder (Run → shell:startup) but soon learned that Windows 10 apparently skips any shortcuts with run as admin specified. I suppose this is to prevent a bunch of UAC blockages from popping up immediately after logging in? Not that it would matter to me, since I disabled UAC, but anyway… this means you have to use the Task Scheduler.

Create a new Task, name it “SBR3Di 5.1 Fix” or something, and make sure to check “Run with highest privileges”. The Trigger is “At log on of any user” and the Action is “Start a program” (your compiled executable). That should do it.